Microsoft Loses Three to the Competition

Microsoft has recently lost a few key engineers and marketers to social networking and gaming companies. While turnover is expected, Microsoft lost three solid citizens of its empire.

Microsoft
has recently lost a few key engineers and marketers to newer search, social
networking and gaming companies.
Chris
Wilson and Douglas Purdy were Microsoft architects who have left Microsoft to
head to Google and Facebook, respectively. And Anand Iyer, a former senior
product manager at Microsoft whose primary job seemed to be to serve as a
liaison between Microsoft and startups in Silicon Valley,
said he is leaving Microsoft to likely join a gaming company.

Wilson
was a platform architect of the Internet Explorer platform team at Microsoft,
and ex-group program manager. He represented Microsoft on several Web-related
standards bodies. He has left Microsoft to join Google at its Seattle
offices in the Fremont neighborhood
of Seattle.

In
a blog post about his
departure, Wilson said: "I'm very excited to work for a company that
invests so much in making the Web platform better for developers and consumers,
and I hope that I can use this as an opportunity to not only do no evil,
but to actively do good." Wilson
was obviously referring to Google's so-called tagline of "Do No Evil."
Wilson
began working on Web browsers in 1993 when he co-authored the first Windows
versions of NCSA Mosaic, the first mass-market WWW
browser. After leaving NCSA in 1994 and spending a year working on the Web
browser for SPRY, Wilson joined
Microsoft's Internet Explorer team as a developer in 1995. Wilson
has participated in many standards working groups, in particular helping
develop standards for CSS (Cascading Style
Sheets), HTML, the DOM (Document Object) and
XSL through the W3C working groups. He also developed the first implementations
of CSS in Internet Explorer.
Meanwhile,
Iyer is leaving the software giant to possibly work for a mobile gaming
company. However, it seems Iyer's leaving is more related to two things. One is
that, in the Valley, at least, Microsoft is no longer viewed as innovative. And
the other is that he was being pressured to move to work out of Microsoft
headquarters in Redmond, Wash.
"I
had a candid conversation with my management," Iyer
said in a blog post. "I was told that while I was doing well (paraphrasing
;) in order to move ahead in my career, I needed to move to Redmond
- it was a matter of -when'. I would have to give up my home, my family, my
friends and move from one of the best cities in the world to, well, Redmond."
It
is kind of hard to be Microsoft's evangelist to Silicon Valley
if you have to work in Redmond.
In
his post, Iyer reminisces: "I started in January 2005 as a Developer Evangelist
based in the Valley - my job was to 'sell' developers on the idea of .NET.
One of my first assignments was Visual Studio 2005 and Team System (this was
Microsoft's foray into the ALM - Application Lifecycle Management -- space)."
Iyer
then talks about evangelizing Windows Vista, Silverlight, Windows Azure, open
source, interoperability, the company's BizSpark program for startups, and for
the last 15 months Windows Phone 7, as a product manager on that technology's
developer platform.
However,
at a startup-focused event sponsored by PayPal, where the topic of innovation
came up, Iyer saw how much of an uphill battle he faced. "Later on, the
audience was polled to see who they thought was a company that bred innovation,
like PayPal did, and the options were: Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Apple," he
said in his post. "No mention of Microsoft. (FYI, Facebook won that poll)."
So,
pressured to move, Iyer said he decided to leave Microsoft instead. "I'm sad
but I know this is absolutely the right thing for me to do," he said. "I've met
the most amazing, most diverse and by far the most intelligent group of people
over the last few years. The opportunities that Microsoft has helped create for
me are truly unbelievable and I will be forever grateful. Everyone I've met and
dealt with has and will continue to have a profoundly significant influence on
my life."
Ironically,
location played a bit in both Iyer's and Wilson's decision to move on. Though
Microsoft has one of the most varied and talented work forces in the business,
the company has had trouble getting many employees to move to and then stay in
the Redmond/Seattle area. Said Wilson: "I'll spare the minor details of my
decision (other than how excited I am to turn my Office-Space-style commute
into a 6 mile bike ride to Google's
Fremont office)..."
Meanwhile,
Microsoft's decision to kill or severely hamper its Oslo
tools effort hastened former Microsoft software architect Douglas Purdy to
leave early in September. The project codenamed Oslo
was a set of future Microsoft modeling technologies that aim to provide
significant productivity gains across the lifecycle of .NET
Framework applications by enabling developers, architects and IT professionals
to work together more effectively.
Although Purdy does not come out and say the dismantling of Oslo
affected his decision, of his move to Facebook, sources at Microsoft said it
did. In
a blog post, Purdy said: "Today is my first day at Facebook. During my
conversations with the leadership there, it was clear that Facebook is
committed to becoming an essential platform for developers, helping them to be
successful through open-source tools, frameworks and, of course, Web APIs.
Further, the Facebook vision around the Graph API
and Open Graph Protocol (which debuted at f8 this spring) is the closest thing
to what I call the -Infobus' I have yet seen; convincing me that Facebook was
one of the most leveraged places for me."

Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.